Religious freedom is just that: freedom. Note that we don’t call it “religious comfort.” In other words, yes, government should protect my right to practice my religion, but it’s not society’s obligation to make that practice easy or carefree. If your faith prevents you from sitting on an airplane next to a woman who isn’t your wife, then move to another seat. If your faith tells you you can’t go to the same bathroom with some people, then figure out how to order your life so that you use the bathroom in a place that seems appropriate for you. If your faith tells you you can’t sell wedding cakes to certain people, don’t go into the business of selling wedding cakes.

Laws barring trans bathroom access don’t just keep trans women out of women’s bathrooms, they also keep trans men in women’s bathrooms. In other words, it is now the law for the man in the image in the above tweet to use women’s public restrooms in North Carolina. This means that cisgender men could take advantage of laws barring trans bathroom access to enter women’s bathrooms dressed as men and claiming to be trans men. Doing this wouldn’t even require dressing as a woman.

As best as I can tell, the pro-segregation set believe that allowing transgender people to use the restroom of their choice, creates a public safety threat for women and girls. It’s very much a “they are coming for your wives and daughters” vibe out there. Which, clearly, overlooks the fact that anywhere in America provides a public safety threat for women and girls. If we’re going to talk about rape, let’s talk about college campuses. Let’s talk about the military. Let’s talk about football players and domestic violence. Let’s talk about a culture that worships masculinity, objectifies women and glorifies violence–all adding up to a pervading world of male entitlement that is, always and everywhere, a danger to your wives and daughters.

It’s simple cause-and-effect, you see: Corporate HR must be allowed to ask any job applicant if they’re gay “because we don’t hire that kind of people,” otherwise your daughter is going to be attacked by a man in a trenchcoat hiding in the stall next to hers. If two women dining together in a public restaurant can’t be interrogated about whether or not they’re a couple — and denied service if they say yes — then grown men will start using the girls showers at the local YWCA and there will be nothing anyone can do to stop it.

It’s that all the campaigning they’ve done, all the many millions of dollars spent, all the hours passionately preaching about the evils of LGBTQ people generally, all the persecution and harassment they dole out to a group that never meant them any harm at all, all the training they give their children in how to persecute and harass that group, all the tantrums they throw, all the threats they make to starve themselves for bigotry, to raise arms against the country they claim to love and even to ragequit that country by trying to secede from it, and all the smears and lies they tell with their biggest Jesus smiles on their faces, are being spent to wage a war that they have already lost and that is being lost harder every year.

Allowing these Others to roam unfettered and uncontrolled by their superiors will cause them to rise up in bloodlust and fury to vent their natural, animal urges on the beautiful, virtuous cisgender (or white, or Christian, or American) women that those Others desire above all their own women. And all that stands in the way of this orgy of rape are the good, godly cisgender (or white, or Christian, or American) men who refuse to let it happen.

There is, please allow me to stress, not one scintilla of evidence that trans women pose any kind of threat to ciswomen in bathrooms, nor that bathroom bills cause the slightest uptick in harassment of ciswomen by either trans women or cis men.

But there is plenty of evidence that right-wing, straight, cisgender Christians are already a big danger to both transgender people and cisgender people in bathrooms.

At the risk of being repetitive, allowing trans people to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity is not a new thing. Before the backlash against the trans bathroom access bills (a) it was generally legal for trans people to use the bathrooms they felt appropriate and (b) trans women generally did use the bathrooms they felt appropriate. Yes, they risked getting harassed, yelled at, or facing violence, but trying to end that harassment is literally the only change trans bathroom bills make to the status quo.

“People did come to my aid. The police came. The EMTs came. They put a tube in my throat. The police officer says, as I’m sitting in the gurney, ‘This never would have happened to you if you weren’t wearing a dress and trying to fool men.'”

“We know that stigma and lifetime discrimination influence suicide rates, whether we’re talking about transgender people or another marginalized group,” she told The Daily Beast. “Policies like HB 2 are not solving a problem—they are actually making things worse.”